Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Mother Russia is on the move, she can't stand still, she's restless and can't find rest, she's talking and she can't stop.

And remember: you must never, under any circumstances, despair. To hope and to act, these are our duties in misfortune.

If it's so painful to love and absorb electricity, how much more painful it is to be a woman, to be the electricity, to inspire love.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.